Koonin Eugene V. The Logic of Chance: The Nature and Origin of Biological Evolution

Pearson Education, 1st ed., 2011. - 516 p.
About the evolution of life on Earth in the light of the latest achievements of modern molecular biology and comparative geomics. The “classical” model of linear “tree-like” evolution is criticized as not corresponding to reality. A variant of a more complex evolutionary model is proposed, in which the transfer of genetic information between organisms by viruses plays a key role.
The Logic of Chance offers a reappraisal and a new synthesis of theories, concepts, and hypotheses on the key aspects of the evolution of life on earth in light of comparative genomics and systems biology. The author presents many specific examples from systems and comparative genomic analysis to begin to build a new, much more detailed, complex, and realistic picture of evolution. The book examines a broad range of topics in evolutionary biology including the inadequacy of natural selection and adaptation as the only or even the main mode of evolution; the key role of horizontal gene transfer in evolution and the consequent overhaul of the Tree of Life concept; the central, underappreciated evolutionary importance of viruses; the origin of eukaryotes as a result of endosymbiosis; the concomitant origin of cells and viruses on the primordial earth; universal dependences between genomic and molecular-phenomic variables; and the evolving landscape of constraints that shape the evolution of genomes and molecular phenomes.
Preface Toward a postmodern synthesis of evolutionary biology
The fundamentals of evolution: Darwin and Modern Synthesis
From Modern Synthesis to evolutionary genomics: Multiple processes and patterns of evolution
Comparative genomics: Evolving genomescapes
Genomics, systems biology, and universals of evolution: Genome evolution as a phenomenon of statistical physics
The web genomics of the prokaryotic world: Vertical and horizontal flows of genes, the mobilome, and the dynamic pangenomes
The phylogenetic forest and the quest for the elusive Tree of Life in the age of genomics
The origins of eukaryotes: Endosymbiosis, the strange story of introns, and the ultimate importance of unique events in evolution
The non-adaptive null hypothesis of genome evolution and origins of biological complexity
The Darwinian, Lamarckian, and Wrightean modalities of evolution, robustness, evolvability, and the creative role of noise in evolution
The Virus World and its evolution
The Last Universal Common Ancestor, the origin of cells, and the primordial gene pool
Origin of life: The emergence of translation, replication, metabolism, and membranes — the biological, geochemical, and cosmological perspectives
The postmodern state of evolutionary biology
Appendix A: Postmodernist philosophy, metanarratives, and the nature and goals of the scientific
endeavor
Appendix B: Evolution of the cosmos and life: Eternal inflation, many worlds in one, anthropic
selection, and a rough estimate of the probability of the origin of life